We have spent centuries building societies on the assumption that people can govern themselves. Our institutions are premised on individual responsibility, private property, free expression, voluntary association, markets, constitutional limits, and the belief that adults can generally be trusted to govern themselves.

Yet much of today’s politics appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Competence increasingly seems negotiable, perhaps even disqualifying. Expertise is often treated with suspicion. Complex problems are compressed into slogans. Identity matters more than accomplishment, authenticity more than knowledge, and how a politician makes people feel more than that politician’s ability.

Why? And more importantly, what happens to our democracy when understanding a political argument matters less than producing the politically correct reaction?

That is a different question from whether conservatives or liberals are right. It is a question about self-government itself. The old populist argument was simple: the elites have failed you, so “power to the people.”

The emerging version may be something stranger: you don’t need knowledge; you only need someone or something to blame.

That’s a very different kind of populism.

What replaces them?

If individual responsibility declines, what replaces it? If open markets are rejected, who allocates? If private property becomes less secure, who decides what belongs to whom? If institutional authority is weakened, what replaces it? If competence becomes subordinate to identity, how do complex societies keep functioning? And if citizens lose the habit of independent judgment, who’s left to govern?

Perhaps our greatest vulnerability is also our greatest strength. Free people are difficult to control. But they can also be persuaded to surrender their freedoms if you convince them that those freedoms are responsible for their problems.

Individualism can slide into selfishness, while freedom can decay into license. Skepticism can become nihilism, and populism can become tribal. Democracy can weaken the very conditions that make democracy viable.

Collapse is not inevitable, but we should recognize the warning signs.

Failure is unlikely to arrive as tanks in the streets or governments falling overnight. It will be more mundane: institutional competence mattering less; political loyalty mattering more than truth; citizens becoming increasingly unable to agree on basic facts; disagreements becoming moral emergencies; government assuming responsibilities once reserved to individuals; and political leaders being rewarded for promises rather than results.

The most troubling sign may be simpler still:

People become increasingly certain of what they believe while becoming increasingly incapable of explaining why they believe it.

That’s how a civilization becomes stupid—not by losing intelligence, but by losing the habit of using it.

And that may be the most consequential issue facing our civilization.

Not whether the left or right is winning. Not even whether populism is winning.

What if the real winner is a political system that no longer requires citizens to think for themselves?

If that is happening, we should probably figure it out before we discover the answer the hard way.

God Bless America.

Allan J. Feifer, American Thinker